I remember being unimpressed about playing a Seeker, and the handbook certainly regards them as a challenge,

What core mechanic is such a poor fit? Are there any standard remediations (choice of feats, items, or class features) that fix these mechanics, besides "Play a hunter?"

From a purely subjective-memory point of view, I didn't feel that they performed very well as a controller. It didn't (this was 3 years ago?) feel like they could clear minions, cause people not to go places, or move people around particularly well. Contrast invoker: fear my minion clearing and status wrath; wizard: fear the fact that I'm a wizard and can do anything I want; psion: fear my debuffs; etc. There just wasn't anything for enemies to fear about the seeker.

Please remember good subjective bad subjective here. I am quite capable of reading the handbook, and my personal play experience was many years ago. I'm looking for concrete examples from play that illustrate the problems of a Seeker and fixes in context of their game.
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Brian Ballsun-StantonSep 23 '13 at 5:28

2 Answers
2

Here are the trends, there are exceptions, but they are rare. I will compare Seekers to real controllers, like Wizards, Invokers and Psions. I will call them WIP for brevity. Hunters are comparable to Seekers.

Survivability

Seekers have more HP and lower AC than WIPs (Wizards and Psions will have to take a feat to achieve this). Seekers have one of the best Will in the game, and this is the most important non-AC defense.
These mostly cancel each other out, and does not even matter if the defender does his job right.
If team monster gets to you however, WIPs mostly have Staff Expertise, but a Seeker has to invest in getting away. A minor Shift is nice, but does not help in difficult terrain or in a grab.

Control

Seekers create lots of difficult terrain. This is good in low heroic, but after that you meet many creatures with Reach, Flight, Teleport, Forced movement, or simply Shift 4. For them difficult terrain does not really matter.

Seekers mostly do soft control, like "the target takes Dex damage if it moves". First, the damage is too low to matter after low heroic. Second, even at low levels the choice is the DM's, so if you have one with a good tactical instinct, you do not achieve anything above a Ranged Basic Attack.
Compare this to the hard control of the WIP: "the target can not shift/move, or is prone, blind or dazed.

Seekers attack AC, that is mostly the highest defense. In paragon you can get the Deft Blade feat, to make Basic Attacks target Reflex, but the Light Blade limitation hurts your damage.
WIPs have access to lots of nice attack powers vs Will out of the box.

If you are so inclined, you can build a better single-target controller from a Figher, Warlord, or Warlock, while staying much better at defending, leading or striking.

Damage

The only redeeming factor of the Seeker. With a Hungry Gouge you can do respectable damage.
If you go for precision, Superior Crossbow is also great, and you do not need those minors anyway.

In paragon you can get the great Primal Eye feat, to add your secondary attribute to RBAs. But this is accessible to anyone with a multiclass feat, I have seen a great sorcerer with it.

Feat Support

Aside from Primal Eye, Seekers have no feat support worth mentioning. Invokers and Psions have great class specific feats, not to mention Wizards.

Overall

A Genasi Wizard with the Elemental Empowerment feat and a Lightning Staff will do more damage and better control, against twice or three times as many targets as a Seeker.

With the Seeker a heavy optimizer can achieve the level of usefulness of a vanilla Wizard. Sometimes it is a good thing, in a non-optimizing party this can be used to avoid the tension between the optimizer and others.

Because of the math of DnD4e (one monster for one player), you are only an asset to your party if you are stronger than the average monster. For this reason do not give a Seeker to a beginner.

I think you have to examine the powers they can choose from more so than their stat allocation which I believe is comparable to most other classes. The problem I see with the class is it does a few things which at the higher levels start to offer not as much bang for your buck.

The Seeker is good in the following ways in my eyes:

Most attacks focus on one target

Good movement around the field

Good at creating lots of difficult terrain

Problems start to emerge due to the following:

A lot of their attacks don't have a type (which can affect feat selection)

No AOE powers are very effective, and most zones hit both allies and enemies

Not very effective at point blank range

Not good against enemies with strong movement modes such as flight or teleportation

Not very good with enemies that stay at range

So their general strengths start to get overshadowed by their weaknesses, in my opinion.

Interesting, but some examples would be useful in backing up your statements and addressing the rest of the question. Could you add "concrete examples from play that illustrate the problems of a Seeker," or "remediations (choice of feats, items, or class features) that fix these mechanics," or both?
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BESWSep 23 '13 at 6:55

Also, how does focusing on one target make him a controller? Does he do anything meaningful to control that one target relative to other controllers?
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Brian Ballsun-StantonSep 23 '13 at 6:56

I it think suffers from a design-and-drop mentality (Runepriest and a few other classes also have this issue, but they are also generally stronger classes) where there just hasnt been a really any good feats or items made specifically to help boost the class.
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Joshua Aslan SmithSep 23 '13 at 12:07

@JoshuaAslanSmith I've put a bounty on this question. Maybe you could use your comment as the seed of an answer?
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BESWApr 1 '14 at 1:19